War Ends and Means. - book reviews

National Review, July 14, 1989 by Walter A. McDougall

"Gonna lay down my sword and shield /Down by the riverside / And study war no more.

THIS WINSOME PLEDGE from the Negro spiritual can be an anthem of conversion for the individual soul. When made the motto for a nation it is an intimation of suicide. And it became the motto of the United States during the 1960s, when hawks, moved by hubris, and doves, moved by shame and fear, turned their backs on the wisdom about war so painfully earned through millennia of bloodshed and folly.

First the Kennedy and Johnson men became smitten with the technological fix. Substituting computer logic and civilian accounting methods for timeless lessons of strategy based on human nature, they forced the Pentagon to give up Clausewitz for regression analysis. Then the protest generation rebelled against the dehumanization of war and the academy ("I am a human being-do not bend, fold, spindle, or mutilate"). But in railing against the Vietnam War and the nuclear-arms race, the "destructive generation" threw out the baby with the bath water, labeling as fascist not only the foolish means, but also the ends of American military policy. In time, the student Left became the tenured professorial Left, and the sober study of diplomatic history, security policy, and military science retreated on American campuses. It was as if the classics of strategy constituted an occult body of knowledge to be locked away in library garrets lest tender souls discover them and be tempted of the devil.

To be sure, impressive books on war continue to be written, but by military renegades like Colonel Harry Summers, think-tankers like Edward Luttwak, and British academics like Michael Howard, John Keegan, and D. C. Watt-rarely by American professors. Instead, we observe the proliferation of curricula in "peace studies" programmed by the pacifist Left, resulting in a generation of American students as confused and misinformed about war, peace, and the relation between the two as they are, for instance, about God, man, and the relationship between the two.

Yet young Americans are still fascinated by war-and not just the boys who play "GI Joe" or dream of becoming "Top Gun." They thirst for knowledge of World War II and of Vietnam; they admire the genius of a Bismarck. To the consternation of leftists, feminists, and deconstructionists, a good course in diplomatic history or international security still attracts many times more students than one in French social history or gender studies. In fact, just two days after I was asked to review War Ends and Means I received the following letter from a 17-year-old student in a military academy:

I am of the belief that wars have failed as an extension of national politics. I believe that the differences between countries can be solved by diplomacy. I believe that massive killings of armies and civilians have created a dangerous precedent that may ultimately lead to the destruction of mankind! . . . My dad feels that there will always be wars because of historical differences in language, boundaries, religious beliefs, population explosions, etc. . . . Is dad right by saying there will always be wars or am I right by my conviction that animosities between countries can be negotiated? We both would value your opinion and would be most grateful for your kindest help!

The letter moved me deeply-not because of its idealism or innocence, but because of its humility, filial respect, and deference, How much one yearns to tell an inquiring child the facts of life, and how melancholy it is finally to get the chance!

It is precisely this sort of inquiry that Paul Seabury, a professor of political science at Berkeley, and Angelo Codevilla, a veteran of the Senate Intelligence Committee staff and fellow of the Hoover Institution, determined to satisfy. Their purpose is nothing less than to reintroduce the American student to the forbidden wisdom of war -what causes it ("It is not that they love peace less," wrote St. Augustine, "but that they love their kind of peace more"), how to prevent it ("Happy is the city," proclaimed the doges of Venice, "that in time of peace thinks of war"), and how to win it ("To subdue the enemy without fighting," wrote Sun Tzu, "is the acme of skill").

In the course of their exposition, Seabury and Codevilia expose and rebut ten major myths about war propagated with lethal effect by either the "peace studies" crowd or our civilian technocrats. The first is that wars are somehow the product of impersonal forces-economic competition or arms races, for example. To assert this is to mistake symptom for cause, for ultimately war springs from a flawed human nature that creates situations in which "reasonable people regard 'kill or be killed' as the best option available." Hence the second myth to be buried is the smug chant, "War is bad, peace is good." In fact, war is often to be preferred to conditions conventionally called "peace." Consider that in the twentieth century, in which some 35 million people have died as a result of military operations, over 100 million have been killed by political police, from Turkish Armenia, through Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, and Pol Pot's Cambodia, to the present-day Sudan. A third myth popular among "peace studies" types is that "fighting never solved anything"to which Charles Burton Marshall once replied: "Oh yeah? Ask a Southerner!" Like it or not, every great issue in history has ultimately been settled by war.